Man With Arm Extended (After Mapplethorpe and Barthes) was developed as part of a body of research that seeks to address the physical and temporal breaks in kinship between the “lost generation” of artists who died during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, and contemporary queer artists. The project engages archival research, personal associations of family and kinship, and the art historical trope of the momento mori, to re-establish points of connection.

This piece was a re-staging of Robert Mapplethorpe's 1975 self portrait, Young Man with Arm Extended, as the artist first encountered it in Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida.

Made on December 2, 2021; no longer a 'young man', I sat exactly between the age of Mapplethorpe when he made the original, and the age of Barthes when he wrote the book. Mapplethorpe made his work two years before I was born. At the time of making my response, I was two years older than the age that he would live to. It is an image that sits both between and beyond. It is an extension and a reaching outwards. It is an exercise in queer kinship and embodied history.

For Liz.

Archival inkjet print. Two 13cm x 13cm images on 40cm x 20cm paper. Single Edition (plus 2 AP).